Comcast thinks everyone should be forced to rent cable boxes

The NBC and Comcast logo are displayed on top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly known as the GE building, in midtown Manhattan in New York
Thomson Reuters

Here's the reality: if you want to sign up for cable TV today, you'll likely end up saddled with monthly rent payments on a cable box.

As Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler pointed out in a Re/code op-ed Wednesday, American consumers spend $20 billion a year to lease these devices. That puts set-top boxes somewhere between college sports and McDonald's in terms of revenue. Their costs have actually risen 185% in the last two decades.

And Comcast is totally fine with this — in fact, the company wants to keep it this way.

Netflix now has more customers in the U.S. than any traditional TV provider; tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, connected devices for accessing video are ubiquitous; and new online video services are announced all the time ... Comcast is responding with our innovative X1 platform, and enabling access on a growing array of devices ... Given these exciting, pro-consumer marketplace developments, it is perplexing that the FCC is now considering a proposal that would impose new government technology mandates on satellite and cable TV providers with the purported goal of promoting device options for consumers.

But the FCC's proposal will still allow customers to use Comcast's box if they want access to services like the X1 platform. The proposal only means customers would get to decide if they want to pay a monthly rental fee to their cable company, or save money in the long run by buying their own cable box. It's not forcing customers to do one or the other.

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Comcast claims it has your best interests at heart in maintaining the cable industry's set-top box stranglehold, comparing itself to Netflix. But Netflix competes with services like Amazon and legacy cable operators to distribute the best products on the latest hardware. Comcast strikes a different note when it asks you to believe allowing hardware competition from Apple or Roku is unfair regulation. A company operating like Netflix might embrace a proliferation of quality hardware, rather than try to block it.

We've reached out to Comcast for clarification on its statement, and will update if we hear back.